Remember Me studio Dontnod Entertainment was advised by several publishers that making lead character Nilin female would result in weak sales, and that a male star would fare better. However it stuck to its guns and kept Nilin female before signing a deal with Capcom.

Speaking with Penny Arcade, creative director Jean-Maxime Moris recalled, “We had some [companies] that said, ‘Well, we don’t want to publish it because that’s not going to succeed. You can’t have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that’.

“We had people tell us, ‘You can’t make a dude like the player kiss another dude in the game, that’s going to feel awkward.'”

Moris went on to say that this kind of close-mindedness is holding the industry back, “I’m like, ‘If you think like that, there’s no way the medium’s going to mature.’ There’s a level of immersion that you need to be at, but it’s not like your sexual orientation is being questioned by playing a game. I don’t know, that’s extremely weird to me.

“You can identify with people of the other gender in movies, why could you not in games? The fact that our core target is males 15-25 is not an excuse. We need to be able to create, and respect the audience enough to believe that they can be smart enough to identify with that type of character.”